Mother Water. Gulbibi Balkhash takes as its subject Lake Balkhash and approaches its ecological decline through the figure of Gulbibi, a mother-water presence drawn from Central Asian myth and Menlibayeva’s wider vocabulary of ancestral and protective figures. The 16-minute single-channel video brings together this mythological register with a highly synthetic, cyberpunk-like visual language, creating a deliberate tension between the ancient figure of the mother-water and the contemporary image of a landscape under pressure from extraction.

The lake is presented not simply as a landscape in crisis but as a body carrying a much longer cultural memory. Its transformation into the visual language of a screen advertisement places mourning and spectacle within the same frame, asking how ancestral knowledge can persist within radically altered technological and ecological conditions. In the context of Everything Folds, Unfolds, Refolds, the work suggests that inherited forms do not disappear under pressure; they migrate into new visual and material states, resurfacing in altered but recognisable form.